Elemental: War of Magic - News Roundup

by Skavenhorde, 2011-06-21 17:16:36

We haven't posted anything on Elemental in awhile so I thought it's about time to do a roundup. For those of you still interested in seeing what can be done with Elemental here are a few news items you might be interested in:

Champions don’t run around as they did in War of Magic, they don’t come to you, you must go to them. There are no randomly generated champions in the game, each champion is specifically designed to be unique and interesting. Most are found in the world, but some unique champions can only be earned through quests.

RPS: I suppose that was one of the key issues with Elemental’s sandbox approach: there wasn’t quite enough to find, quite enough variety, for it to really feel like you were exploring and getting the most out of this world…

Paxton: Sure, and that’s a shame because the backstory and the lore really does support the creation of an interesting world. It just wasn’t reflected in the gameplay. We had large plains, and then hills, and then plains again. There’s not much to encounter out there, and so one of the pillars of Fallen Enchantress is making sure that the world is full of new and interesting things. Whenever a player starts a new game this time around, they will have something to discover.

RPS: Magic was a bit underwhelming the first time around, wasn’t it?

Paxton: Yes. We’ve gone through all the spells for Fallen Enchantress and looked what they did. We had a decent spell engine in War Of Magic, it could do a lot of things, but maybe not with as much as variety as we wanted. Many of the spells felt too similar. Some of them did the same thing with different numbers, so this time we are looking at each spell individually and we’re coding these spells specifically. That’ll give us unique effects from each of them, different reason why they are used. We also want larger impact spells in Fallen Enchantress. If you have 1000 mana stored then that’s a Civ player sitting on nuclear weapons. If you see someone creeping up on that, you might want to deal with them. Magic will be a significant part of this game, as it was in Master Of Magic.